The characters in Steven Millhauser's new stories, like so many of his earlier characters, are not particularly fond of the real world: they are dreamers, malcontents and escape artists, eager to leave behind their humdrum lives for the febrile world of fantasy and the imagination.

The writer Steven Millhauser was teaching his fiction workshop class at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., on Monday afternoon when the chairman of his department entered the classroom and handed him a note asking him to call a reporter from a local newspaper ''re: Pulitzer.'' ''I told my students that a grotesque error had been committed,'' Mr. Millhauser said yesterday, ''and that I had to straighten it out.'' Of course, it was no error.

Stories, like conjuring tricks, are invented because history is inadequate to our dreams." So says the narrator of Steven Millhauser's story "Eisenheim the Illusionist," and that claim might stand as an epigraph to his new conjuring trick of a novel, "Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer."

Steven Millhauser imagines the imagination as a junk shop with a warren of rooms, one chamber linked to another without any reason except the bewildering reason of the heart. The shop's seeming confusion reminds us of the possibility of surprise the imagination offers.

Steven Millhauser's third novel begins precipitously one fine summer day when Carl Hausman, a disaffected young man who's been sleepily watching a baseball game, chases a foul ball into a woodland thicket and tumbles down a hole into a hidden world - the secret realm of Morpheus, the god of sleep and dreams.

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Steven Millhauser won the Story Prize on Wednesday for his collection ''We Others,'' a book that the judges called ''a powerful and intriguing collection of stories, marked by page after page of beautifully written, intelligent and sensitive prose.''...

March 9, 2003, Sunday

THE KING IN THE TREE Three Novellas By Steven Millhauser 242 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $23. Love is the subject of Steven Millhauser's three new novellas -- not the sweet romantic love of sonnets and Valentine's Day, but a darker, more toxic...